


Sarah

by silverxrain



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 18:46:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4030633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverxrain/pseuds/silverxrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war ended everyone's childhoods too soon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sarah

Steve doesn't know very much about the first woman he ever knows, which is a pity, because she's the only woman he will know until his twenties, when Peggy Carter drops into his life like an unexploded bombshell.

He remembers little things about his mother, the pigtails she wore her light hair in, the shade of blue of her cotton apron. Mostly he remembers her from knee height, a vague impression of lying on the sofa with her. Decades later, his pillow in some nameless fancy hotel smells like lavender and Steve has no idea why his eyes well up with tears when he puts his head down until he comes up with a vague recollection of his mother washing the pillowcases with lavender soap. After that, if he catches the scent of lavender, his mind will return to the memory of the faded yellow pillowcase that he pulls up out of the depths of his head. 

His childhood was so long ago Steve wonders if it actually existed, or if it was always just the war. He has nothing left from the time before he met Erskine, even Bucky reappears more war-tainted than ever and without any memory of the time Steve is beginning to think of as a dream. Captain America never had a childhood where his mother put her cool hand on his fever-hot cheek and cried quietly, thinking he was asleep and didn't hear her. Steve knows now that she thought he was going to die, that time he got sick at age seven, and she didn't have any money left for medication, so she didn't take him to the doctor's, and he never knew how serious it was.

Sarah cared for him the way she learned at her mother' knee, nursing three younger siblings who contracted every non life-threatening childhood illness known to man. Steve knew this because she held him and rocked him gently, telling him about his aunt Susie, uncle Robert and aunt Gloria who were all now in perfect health and living with their children back in Ireland. Sarah repeated each story about who got sick when, and how they survived, and Steve would, too. Steve didn't understand much, except that his mother was being especially good to him because he was sick, and giving him the last of the jam with cake, and putting him to bed every night, and staying home all morning to pour him apple juice, tell him stories and draw with him using stubs of crayon that neighbors threw out. She never usually had time for him, in between nine hour shifts at the all night diner, but she was making time now, because Steve was paler than ever, he felt bad, awful sometimes, and so weak, but it was better because his mother was there.

He didn’t know that Sarah thought her son might die and everything she had worked to build in America would be for no one, and she knew she would fall apart and die without any family left, because she hadn’t heard from her siblings since their mother died, over twenty years ago, and she had nothing left and Steve had to live, he just had to, her only child, her little boy-

Steve sweated through the fever and his temperature returned to normal and he could eat again when the swelling went down, and when she finally scraped together enough money for a checkup, the doctor told her how impressed he was with her care. Told her she had a real hand for nursing sick folks. Sarah took it to heart, no reason why she shouldn't, Susie didn't survive scarlet fever for nothing.

So she became a nurse, and the hours and the pay were better, Steve went to school and was happier, with his newfound passion for art. Sarah would have fretted herself to death if she knew about the almost daily fights that Steve wound up in, but Steve was clever with excuses, and Bucky always took him home and patched him up if there was blood.

Several years later, Steve was slightly healthier, and Sarah was overworking herself, doing graveyard shifts in the hospital wards, anything she could to help the people who were already on low wages, sick with empty stomachs and vulnerable to disease. Her heart was full of compassion but it stretched, and the cords holding her together began snapping and Steve didn’t know if he’d ever noticed but his mother looked tired all the time and she hadn’t had time for him since he was seven years old and not long for this world, she thought.

When a round of tuberculosis hit the neighborhood, she didn’t stand a chance, and although it passed Steve over, Sarah was lying in a hospital bed, with just enough time to thank God she hadn’t been sick long enough to pass it to her son, before her eyes were closed and Steve’s world crumpled in at the edges.

Bucky was there, of course, Bucky was the only constant for him, but it took some time for Bucky to fill the gaps Sarah left behind and in that time the house felt too empty and Steve couldn’t figure out how to feed himself because his mother’s soup was a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and the house was too cold with one less person in it, and Steve didn’t turn the radio on the first night, because he didn’t want to pretend his mother was there, and then he turned it on the second night, because now he did, but it made him feel like his heart was scooped out of his chest when he woke up the next morning and the windows weren’t open, like Sarah would have opened them, so on the third night, he invites Bucky over anyways, and Bucky turns the radio on, too loud, but Steve doesn’t care, and when he wakes up the windows are open, and Bucky’s making breakfast downstairs.

So in time Steve forgot that he ever needed anyone but Bucky, and Bucky moved out of the crowded house full of adopted siblings and in with Steve, forgetting the same thing. They made a new home together, and Steve didn’t ever drink apple juice, because it hit a chord inside him the way certain types of washing powder did, but he still sketched, until the war came and there wasn’t money or marketing for art supplies, and soon there weren’t fresh apples, only bruised ones, but Steve and Bucky ate them anyway, because they needed all the strength they could get if they were going to be tough enough to join the army. Steve watches Bucky get accepted, dreams about the “4F” in red letters, and doesn’t ever think about how Sarah never wanted him to join the army like his father did, because his father fucking died, and _shut up mom, you thought I was going to die at seven because of a stupid fever_ , I can handle anything, _but you couldn’t, mom_ , I’m sorry, _I’m sorry_ and I wish I could believe you were ever happy. Tell me you were, _please tell me you were happy with me._


End file.
